J OHN HERSEY'S novel about some Jews in the Warsaw ghetto under the )J azis, "The Wal},' (Knopf), does not go as deeply into their story as what some of the survivors have written (nota- bly "The Stars Bear Witness," by Bernard GoldsteIn, one of the leaders of the Jewish \\1orkers' Bund In Poland and an organi7er of the desperate uprising), and it is easy to point out defects in his conception of the subject. But surely the great thing to note about this astonishing '-1 nd very moving book is the quick and affec- tionate understanding, the superlative human sympathy, the wealth of love itself, with which Mr. Hersey has intere ted himself In a tradition so dif- ferent from his own, to recall to the world the three million Polish Jews who were massacred durIng the war. He has made of their unspeakable last years in the Nazi ghettos-a period in which most of them were transferred into box- cars for laughter, while another three million Jews from other countries were being systematically wiped out as well- one of the Inost encouraging examples we have that there can be an under- standing between peoples, and that the possibility of it lies in just such an im- aginative act of human solidarity as this book rep- resen ts. Perhaps the worst ef- fect of the maSS.:lcres on the Jews who survived was theIr bitterness at the apparent indifference of the \\1 estern world-to sa) nothing of the horror with which man) Jews in Poland saw that their fel- low anti-Nazis were not altogether unhappy to have the "Jewish question" set- tled in so final a form at last. (Even in the Polish underground there were venomously anti-Semitic newspapers, and partisan groups that spent as much time hunting out Jews as they did fighting the Nazis, while bands of blackmail- ers terrorized the few Jews who escaped the 96 .....;:.ac . I q., f/ Christ" "What I wanted to do [N oach notes later in his diaries 1 was to move our small group of desperate men and women out into the great unI- verse of J ewishness, so that we might take a short vacation from our self-pity and (perhaps) have compassion for the masters of Hollywood and pity the marvelous Einstein and feel sorry for all who are more comfortable and more noticeable than we. Not as superiors, not in condescension; as felJow human be- ings, in all humility, and pitying those others. . . because of the humanity the) share with miserable things like us. I though t this feeling mIght do us good." i\nd then, N oach reports, he read to them the famous words that Peretz had wntten decades before, on the old ghet- to: "We should get out as Jews, with our own spintual treasures. We should interchange, give and take, but not b " ego [t IS just Mr. Hersey's belief in this spirit of "interchange," the pleasure of his discovery of how much these people could give him.. that Inake the book so fine a human document and carries him over the weaknesses in it. One weakness is that his Polish Jews are entirely too ddl I d ". " . mI e-c ass an nIce, so one mIsses the verve and tang of those masses of poor laborers and small traders who were the greater part of Polish Jewry, the implacable fervor and mystical in- tensity among the orthodox, and the mockingly ragged and Inarginallife of the Luft- lllenschen-J ews so poor, even for Polish Jews, that it was prover- bially said they lived "on air." (Noach Levinson, VIr. Herse}'s triumph, wonderfully true as he is, keeps his diaries and re- ports in American-style loose-leaf notebooks; I wonder where he got al] that neatly punched pa- per.) Another weakness is that Mr. H-ersev, who admires in his orthodoÀ characters, such as RabbI Goldflamm, their rich and indestructible reli- gious faith, and in his ZIonist heroine, Rachel Apt, her fighting spirit, is so un just to his Socialist, Henryk Rapaport, a lead- er of the remarkable BOOK5 J OhJ2 Hersey and N oacl Levilzson ghetto.) The extreme expression of this bItterness was, of course, the violent nationalism of the young terrorists in PalestIne. But many Jews in the West- ern democracIes also felt cruelly isolated as they saw how little those terrible events were understood during the war, or, for that matter, even noticed. The most revealing thing about "The \\1 all" C L- is that the more John Herse) grew ab- sorbed in the lives and cultural traditions that were so stubbornly kept up behind that ghetto wall, the more he felt he was getting something from them, There IS a wonderful scene near the end of the book-the period of the desperate up- rising against German Army detach- ments, tanks, and heavy artillery, when the astonished Nazis burned down what was left of the ghetto, house by house- in which the historian N oach Levinson, whose records and diaries compose the tory, lecture to a small group, in an under2"round bunker wedged above the <... ...... Warsaw sewers, on the great Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz. In the darkness and close air ( while German soldiers patrol the streets above, waiting to shoot down the last survivors), N oach finds himself speaking with a strangely tender com- miseration of all those people not in Nazi hands who cannot realize what has been happening inside the ghetto, and then of the extremes of the Jewish experience, "reaching from the lowest pogrom- insect to SpInoza . . . and Einstein and - I, V t {J - I -=:T I ===- '--- O -1L -tJ---:- , Jl t01- t/ t r _____ - ---u -= k- II